Charity Digital Exchange: Grow your charity with AWS

The digital world is complex. Digital applications and tools number in their millions, with new ones emerging every week. For organisations with limited time and resources, such as those in the charity sector, it can be especially difficult to keep pace.  

Keeping pace with digital acceleration is particularly difficult for charities as they begin to grow. Charities want to reach more donors, deliver more services, and help as many in their communities as possible. But if their infrastructure isn’t capable of growing with them, it can prevent them from being able to progress.  

This is where cloud computing services can come in handy. Cloud computing services allow charities to deploy apps and services that suit their charity, only paying for the tools they use, and enabling them to add more as they grow.  

One such service is provided by Amazon. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that helps organisations of all sizes with everything from data analysis to website management.  

Charities can access up to $1000 of AWS credits through the Charity Digital Exchange, valid for 12 months, towards usage fees for usage fees for on-demand cloud services. This means that, when the time comes to innovate, restructure, or adapt to changing circumstances, charities are better able to discover new solutions that can help them move forwards.  

The discounted AWS credits are available for smaller nonprofits, medium-sized nonprofits, and larger non-profits, while the TechSoup Boost 1-Year subscription creates a further discount for these products for one year. 

Below, we explore more about Amazon Web Services and how it can support charities in their growth. 

FIND OUT MORE 

What is AWS? 

AWS is a cloud computing platform that operates like an IT pick ’n’ mix, allowing charities to work flexibly and remotely without the cost of expensive infrastructure, such as their own servers. It enables charities to remain agile, pay only for the services they use, such as content delivery and machine learning tools, and without compromising on the security of their data. 

Comparable providers to AWS include Microsoft Azure, which offers similar subscription-based services and integration with existing IT infrastructure. 

What are the benefits of AWS? 

Website management 

We are all familiar with the stress of a website crashing when experiencing more visitors than usual. For charities, this disruption can be disastrous. For example, while increased traffic may lead to more donations, that is impossible if your website is unable to process them. Likewise, charities may experience more demand for services and need to be able to respond in order to help beneficiaries as quickly as possible. 

AWS helps charities respond to changes in traffic by building a website designed to adapt, limiting website crashes and ensuring your site is available to people as they need it. 

AWS also provides virtual servers, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, that can run applications and perform other critical tasks, processing as much data as you need it to without crumbling under increased pressure. AWS’ AutoScale tool protects the operational health of your organisation by ensuring that your servers have the capacity to process all information as needed, even if more than usual.  

Data-based decision making 

Charities are home to a wealth of data and it can be difficult often to see the wood from the trees. But data holds many of the answers charities are looking for, such as areas of friction in their donor journey that are preventing them from raising more funds. As charities grow, this data has the potential to become even more unwieldy – despite the solutions it may lead to later. 

Through AWS, charities are able to gather, process, analyse, and visualise data to make informed decisions that can boost fundraising and improve services. AWS tools can analyse lots of data at once, store large amounts of data safely, and present it to team members in easily digestible ways, making it all the easier to make the right decisions for the future of the organisation. Combined with other AWS tools, charities can also use this data to predict future outcomes using machine learning and AI. 

Volunteering and recruitment 

As charities grow, demand for volunteers and ad-hoc support may too. Charities may want to take on temporary staff for periods of high demand and volunteers often come and go as time allows. AWS enables this flexibility, equipping volunteers, freelance employees, and other staff with virtual desktops without long-term licensing agreements. 

Innovation 

Not only can AWS tools allow charities to build and train machine learning models to make informed predictions using their data, it also helps them build bespoke applications using coding tools. This is a glimpse of the more advanced services provided by AWS, but also reflects the capacity to help charities innovate as their organisation (and their digital confidence) grows.  Read the case study